Transfer in's and out's rumours etc.

[Jezleeds]

Not sure why you feel the need to "defend him"?

It isn't Orta who took a squad of players largely brought together before he arrived and made them into a promotion-winning side, it was (and remains) Bielsa, (and I have said many times that I was wrong about Bielsa!). THAT is why we are able to look at players of the sort you name (whether they turn out to be the right ones, time will tell). And we have retained players for exactly the same reason, they want to play having been coached by Bielsa, not having been selected by Orta (which the vast majority haven't).

Just to give some basis for my statements,

The following were brought in in Ortas first year as DoF (from June 2017), although some you will see were either the results of scouting before he arrived, academy graduates, or loanees from previous years who were converted into "permanent" signatures;

Arrivals 2017/18 (Orta arrived as DoF early June 2017) - Those with bullet points made material first team appearances, all others didn't

• Forshaw – Jan 2018
• Jansson - Aug 2016 (Loan)
• Saiz – June 2017
• Roberts – Jan 2018
• Alisoki – July 2017
• Klich – June 2017

Sacko
De Bock
Grot
Cibicki
Ekuban
Ideguchi
Halme
Wiedwald
Lonergan
Gomes
Borthwick-Jackson
Anita
Dalby
Bouy
Stevens
Lassogga
Pennington
Shaugnessy
Denton
Murphy

• Pearce – June 2016 (from Academy)

Bellusci

Total Spend - £25.59m
Income - £15.75 (£14.76 for Chris Wood)

As a comparison, let's look at the spend/income figures for 2018/19, the first year of Bielsa as head coach

2018/19 (Bielsa arrives early June 2018)

Spend - £10.26m (Bamford £7.11m, Douglas £3.06m)
Income - £6.57m

(None of these figures come from my head, and whilst Transfermarkt might not be perfect, at least it's objective).

No more supermarket sweep tactics on the part of our DoF, hoovering up non-entities and trying to get the various inexperienced coach/managers to use them in the 1st team, Bielsa wouldn't wear that.

None of the current success can be attributed to the performance of our DoF (unless anyone can supply evidence, not hearsay, about whatever part he played in Bielsa coming to Leeds), quite the opposite. If he had not had the influence on his scouting activities that Bielsa brought to bear, we would still have a bloated senior squad, filled with those he could find on the cheap in a desperate hope that one or two might turn out to be ok ("never mind the quality, feel the width", springs to mind), and we would be in the Championship at best.

I don't think anyone could argue he has been successful in the way we would have hoped, throughout his time. Mitigating circumstances in 2017-2019 in terms of FFP and our lack of funds also played a significant part in the choices he was making, you would have to think. The bottom of the barrel was always going to offer meagre pickings, compared to the middle of the barrel, where we're choosing from now.

The recruitment of Bielsa on its own is a huge positive. Perhaps over time his success rate has improved - whether that's down to Orta or Bielsa's choices of players, we'll probably never know - perhaps it's down to the poor coaching of some of the players who failed - maybe Bielsa would have helped them too to be a success?

Goalkeepers have been a particular area of failure, in my opinion - only Meslier out of, what, four/five has been even secure. However, it appears our model has taken time to bed in, and hopefully these big recruits this summer will confirm that the 'team' around Bielsa and Orta are in synch, and know what to get and when now.